Corruption plagues nation whose mighty potential remains unfulfilled

Near the end … the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh. Photo: Reuters

Sachin Tendulkar, predictably the last to survive of Indian cricket's once-mighty batting line-up, is staggering, rather than striding, towards the end of a storied career.

Last week he retired from one-day cricket and will soon vacate his slot in the Test side too. Those to follow have potential but are not proven, and the uncertainty of a post-Tendulkar world is still feared in India, rather than accepted as inevitable.

The team, too, is losing, even on the favourable home pitches where they always used to win. The old certainties are no more.

As so often, the travails of India's cricket team are a barometer for the country's mood. The world's largest democracy finds itself in a period of transition.

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Politically, the country is preparing for the end of the Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh era, and wondering what comes next. Singh is 80, and will not lead the government much longer. Gandhi, the person really in charge, is in poor health, and the transition she is engineering will be one last great act of service to her adopted country.

Running the country has been the Gandhi family business since independence. But the next in line is either playing a very long game or is less interested in staffing the shop than his forebears.

Rahul Gandhi - prime-minister-in-waiting to his supporters, India's dilettante-in-chief to his critics - has organised the Congress Party's youth wing and spearheaded a few failed state-level campaigns.

At 42, the ''boy king'' sobriquet no longer quite fits, and given Congress's current unpopularity (thanks largely to a string of massive corruption scandals), in 2014 the electorate might deal him out of the job once viewed by most as his birthright.

Economically, the awakening giant of India's market, while not exactly slipping back into hibernation, has not emerged with the vigour expected or hoped for.

This has been India's worst economic year in a decade. The halcyon days of double-digit growth are memories, and even 6 per cent seems beyond the moribund economy for 2012-13.

Regardless, some 12 million people joined the labour market this year, and the same number will next. Finding well-paying, new-economy jobs for India's huge, oft-vaunted youth bulge will dominate economic policy for years.

But it's a tough slog. Efforts to reform the economy - the government has just won a hard-fought, overdue battle to allow foreign supermarkets into India - are met with fierce resistance from protectionist forces, and bureaucratic delays cripple crucial infrastructure projects.

Even the celebrated rupee has fallen on hard times, and even harder exchange rates.

In 2010, to India's enormous pride, its currency was given its own global symbol to sit alongside those of the dollar, pound, euro and yen. Two years on, the rupee has lost more than 18 per cent of its value, and buys fewer US dollars than it has in a decade.

The great social movement of India's past two years, the anti-corruption crusade, has also faded badly.

In 2011, Gandhian Anna Hazare - to the outside world an old man in a white hat who wouldn't eat anything - commanded tens of thousands of acolytes to rallies and hunger strikes, protesting against the government's and the country's spectacular venality. But by 2012's end, there is little to show for a nationwide movement, save a continuing public frustration.

Promised anti-corruption legislation has not eventuated, and the ombudsman it would set up has been condemned as toothless. India recognises the problem but has not yet found a place to start tackling a scourge that, daily, infects almost every level of existence in this country.

India also has far to go in its treatment of women. Girls are still hugely disadvantaged, millions daily suffer violence and abuse or are kept from school, left hungry or forced into work.

A government report this year found 42 per cent of Indian children were malnourished, "a national shame" according to the Prime Minister.

But India has extraordinary potential, especially in its young, energetic and aspirational population, anxious to learn, to achieve and to better itself.

The country has achieved great things in 2012: it officially eradicated polio, one of the most remarkable public health achievements of this century; and it fired Agni V, joining the club of elite nations bearing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Perversely, the latter drew greater public celebration.

This has been a hard year to categorise for India. Neither mirabilis nor horribilis, but certainly turbulent. It can expect more to follow.